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Posts Tagged ‘SNES’

I know it was originally Panel De Pon in Japan and then it became Pokémon Puzzle League but to me it’ll always be Tetris Attack, the maddeningly addictive puzzle game that was permanently lodged inside my OG Game Boy for a good year after it came out, and then permanently lodged inside the Super Game Boy once my sister discovered how great it was.

I am no good at Tetris Attack. I mean I am HOPELESS at Tetris Attack. That didn’t stop me from playing it for hours on end, hoping that I could somehow get better at it, but I never really understood how to see chain reactions ahead of time, they just kind of happened to me by fluke and I rolled with it like I knew what was going on.

Disappointingly I never got around to playing the SNES version, which is a shame because I know I would have enjoyed the two player mode!

I busted this comic out really quickly across multiple devices so I don’t have a video to show of me drawing it so here’s a play through of the Game Boy version.

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I love love LOVE Yoshi’s Island so so much. It is pretty much my favourite platform game ever!

There is so much to explore and find and do and enjoy, there is always something new to find even twenty years after the game first came out. It is a great Mario game!

It’s one of the games I have to play with the sound down though, because Mario’s high pitched screams would drive the wife nuts. This is a shame, because not only is this one of those things I wish I knew about her before I got married but Yoshi’s Island has an absolutely fantastic soundtrack!

I love the opening story that’s told like a children’s book. I love the toy box music in the intro that actually slows down to a stop before someone cranks it back up again. I love the title screen that changes depending on how you’re doing and I completely ripped off for a game I helped make many years later. I love that the entire game is so happy. I love the crayon graphics. I love the blackboard graphics. I love the 3D graphics. I love different vehicles you can transform into and why didn’t anyone think that was weird. I love that Mario and Luigi were such good brothers that they always knew where each other were. I love Baby Mario and Luigi. I love that everything looks like it was drawn by hand. I love the boss battles. I love how every level offers a new surprise and something you don’t see anywhere else. I love the battle on the moon. I love the final boss battle. I love so much about this game!

This was the last great SNES game and I really think it was the last great 2D platform game too. If you’ve never played it I can’t encourage you to try it enough. It was also released on GBA and that was pretty good too, but the SNES one is the best.

Here are some other comics you might like!

The battle between Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros. 3 will always be hotly contested. Frankly I’ll always prefer Yoshi’s Island over both of them but that’s another story.

But MAN! What a great game Super Mario World was. AND it came packed in with the Super Nintendo – you seriously couldn’t ask for a better pack in game. There was SO MUCH packed into the cartridge – secret levels, secret levels only accessible secretly from secret levels, challenging platform action, and fancy visuals that looked amazing back when it was released.

It’s only in retrospect that we can go, yeah, it was a biiiiiiit of a downgrade from Super Mario Bros. 3, especially in the power-ups department. C’mon, look into your heart, you know it to be true.

Oh yeah! Here’s a sped-up video of me drawing this thing! Do you like these things?

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I know everyone likes to talk about their first Mario Kart being the best one, like for example a lot of people I know started with Mario Kart 64 and say that’s NOT average at best! But you can’t doubt that as far as battle mode goes, it never got better than Battle Course 2 on Super Nintendo.

There was just something about how the karts gripped the road as you slid around the corner, the colour-coded sections of the map that let you know instantly where your opponent was, and the size of the map that perfectly hit the sweet spot between hunting and conflict that made for a perfect head-to-head experience. And for once, just once, I felt like I was playing against someone who was completely equally skilled as myself in a game. Usually I’m the guy that completely sucks in comparison to the person I’m playing with.

Oh and here’s your time-lapse video of me drawing the comic! It is sped up considerably over the 15 or so hours it took me to make it. Not pictured: me trying to balance the Surface Pro 2 on my lap with various cats crawling all over me every night, or compensating for mistakes made when people keep bumping the damn work lunch table, or trying to keep away from people while I’m drawing in a crowded pub full of jerks. CARTOONING IS A HARD LIFE.

I really liked the Blues Brothers game, it was basically a cartoony platformer very much in the style of Chip ‘n Dale or Duck Tales on the NES, but it was also released for pretty much every machine around at the time, and that was pretty cool!

One thing though, it wasn’t exactly a faithful conversion of the movie. I mean sure, you could play as either one of the Blues Brothers, and there was nice background music, and you collected music notes and instruments from around town to try and put a band together, but that’s pretty much it. After a few minutes you’re being carried around by balloons and swimming and jumping on clouds and avoiding aliens and look just check it out for yourself:

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AKA Krusty’s Super Fun House on the Super Nintendo and MegaDrive AKA Krusty World in Japan AKA a game that wasn’t actually meant to be a Simpsons game until just before it came out.

This is an OK game, sorta, I guess? A symptom of it not being really developed with the Simpsons in mind is that we end up with Bart Simpson just standing around a rat-stomping machine like it’s no big deal. There’s overly convoluted mazes to explore where you collect items for you to make paths for your rats to follow to their demise and well that’s pretty much it but back in 1992 that’s pretty much all you needed to make a video game. Back when Lemmings was a “thing” instead of a sadly neglected Sony property everyone was looking for the “next Lemmings” so it’s easy to see why this got published.

Anyway, I bought this because I am a perpetual sucker for Simpsons games and always will be. Not to mention that I enjoy drawing the buggers because that gives me yet another excuse to watch more Simpsons on TV.

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Poor old Ness is the Macaulay Culkin of video games. No matter what he does next, and some of the new stuff is pretty sketchy, people will always remember him for his childhood antics.

Still, even Macaulay Culkin wound up with Mila Kunis at some point so I guess it’s not all bad.

Anyway! Earthbound is one of those games that you really “had to have been there” in order to appreciate – it rode high on the wave of new interest in J-RPGs and had a unique setting and storyline – but the amount of reverence it gets nowadays makes it almost unapproachable today. It’s like trying to watch Donnie Darko for the first time but you’re sitting in a room full of film students who are falling over themselves to gush about how amazing it all is.

Konami’s wild west-themed sidescroller had a lot of character and charm, which overcame the repetitive gameplay long enough for it to be considered a classic. Bury me with my money, etc. I just felt bad for the guys who were just minding their own business on a roof that got gunned down all the time.

I heard a rumour once that Sunset Riders was going to be included in Microsoft’s Game Room, but that’s only because I walked by the office where it was being made onetime and saw it up and running. Then again I saw a lot of unreleased games for that platform that never came out for one reason or another. Oh well!

Here are some other comics you might like!

I’m sure someone, somewhere, is working on that gritty next-generation sequel to Pang that will redefine everything you thought you knew about popping floating balls with a harpoon gun.

But until that day we only have our imaginations and the magic of comics to lead us into the future.

OK! Pang was a pretty cute game, I liked it, you would probably like it too if you think games should be about stupid things that don’t make sense, which I definitely do. It was rather addictive, watching the bubbles bounce around, and there was a decent amount of strategy involved in popping them into smaller bubbles without getting trapped on the ground, and there was always the lure of seeing what the next location around the world would look like. I played it on the Amiga a lot back in the day, and the balls had lots of colour in them, and then I’d play it on the C64 and it just wasn’t the same by any stretch of the imagination.

Time to fire it up again, I think!

Edit: BREAKING NEWS: I just found out that Pang is called Buster Bros. in other parts of the world! But wasn’t that a Sega game about criminals escaping from a shopping mall or something? Oh wait that was Bonanza Bros. never mind. Come to think of it there are a lot of Bros. in video games. Snow Bros. were cool too!

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Nintendo and Argonaut’s groundbreaking 3D shooter turned a lot of heads when it first hit the Super Nintendo back in the day, and for good reason – it was a fantastic game!

But of course it was the visuals that drew the crowds – all those rotating polygons! Polygons on a console, that was sheer madness. It was like those games that were starting to be on the PC, but actually within the price range of mere mortals. It took the whiz-bang tech of games like Starglider 2 and married it with Nintendo’s character design and pick-up-and-play sensibility, and it turned out just wonderfully.

I played the crap out of Star Fox (Star Wing in PAL territories for some reason nobody could ever quite agree on – was it because of some ancient computer game called Star Fox? Was it a dispute with Lucasarts? Every magazine back in the day had their own theory) and loved finding all the little secrets. There were the simple ones like following Slippy through the arches at the start which gave you a hidden power up, and then there were the pilots floating in space (presumably dead, but hey) after you shot some asteroids, and then there the just darn goofy ones like the hidden level with a fruit machine in it that you could never escape from. What was the deal with that? I guess space gambling is a problem.

I like the way the captain says GOOD LUCK at the start of your mission, that’s neat, I wish that was a ring tone.